{"id":83273,"date":"2022-10-01T00:06:10","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T00:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-stadias-shutdown-isnt-the-end-of-cloud-gaming\/"},"modified":"2022-10-01T00:06:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-01T00:06:10","slug":"google-stadias-shutdown-isnt-the-end-of-cloud-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/google-stadias-shutdown-isnt-the-end-of-cloud-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Stadia’s shutdown isn’t the end of cloud gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"
An understandable knee-jerk response to Google shuttering its Stadia game-streaming service is: That must be it for cloud gaming, right? We have proven that nobody wants it. Now go away with your laggy, fuzzy, insubstantial server-side gaming. The market says no.<\/p>\n
This is not the first time this has happened. Cloud gaming service OnLive tried to steal a march on a nascent technology in 2010 \u2014 disastrously too early, it turned out. The service was closed in 2015 after Sony bought it to, essentially, strip it for parts. Stadia, which was launched by one of the world’s richest companies, boasted cutting-edge engineering, and was located at the physical heart of the internet \u2014 ie, in Google’s data centers \u2014 lasted half as long. That seems to imply a downward trajectory for a technology that many gamers, with a longstanding attachment to local play on consoles and PCs, are skeptical of.<\/p>\n
But this assumption would be a mistake. Cloud gaming still has many hurdles to overcome: technical, logistical, in terms of marketing and public perception. But it also has enormous potential benefits in terms of accessibility and ease of use. The truth is that Stadia’s failure is purely and solely down to Google. It chose the wrong strategy for the wrong moment, and then, despite its limitless resources, simply gave up.<\/p>\n
Even though Stadia’s 2019 launch came nine long years after OnLive’s, and in the wake of other, similar services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce Now, back then it was early days for cloud gaming \u2014 and it still is now. There are multiple things holding back our readiness for this technology.<\/p>\n
First among them is the quality of data networks (both wired and wireless), which varies enormously by geography, and has a far more significant impact on the cloud gaming experience than it does on one-way media streaming like audio and video. Even where I live, in London, a major European capital, 5G mobile and fiber broadband are not universally available. In other markets, the situation is much worse.<\/p>\n
Secondly, cloud gaming requires a bigger leap of faith from the gaming audience than many marketers seem to realize. Though there are considerable advantages, such as the elimination of lengthy downloads, it represents a far bigger change for consumers than the shift to streaming in other media. We have had movies and music beamed into our homes via TV and radio for many decades; we are used to separating the content from the delivery system. Non-local gaming has never happened before, and divorcing the game from the hardware that plays it \u2014 accepting that the magic is happening somewhere else<\/em> \u2014 is a subtle but powerful mental block. It’s also one with real, tangible disadvantages when it comes to quality, which is a compromise that users have come to accept for TV and movies, but not so much for games \u2014 at least, not yet.<\/p>\n So, Google tried to catch the cloud gaming wave while it was still early. This wasn’t necessarily a disastrous choice, and the moment was probably right for a soft launch \u2014 Stadia’s technology was already excellent, and Google was ready to change minds. But, oddly, a company known for its cautious, iterative approach went all-in with a major, heavily marketed consumer launch instead.<\/p>\n This was a terrible miscalculation. Consumers, unprepared for the very concept of cloud gaming and unclear on how it complemented the gaming hardware they already owned, simply shrugged and looked the other way. Google then compounded this error with a disastrously misguided business model focused on product: the Stadia controller hardware, and the games themselves, which you had to buy at full price (often and absurdly priced higher than they were on Steam).<\/p>\n Adopting a retail model for an intangible product was never going to work, as customers rightly asked what, exactly, it was they were buying. Nothing, as it turned out; Google has at least had the good grace to refund their now-worthless purchases. Stadia didn’t sell because it was an unappealing deal.<\/p>\n